1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to network management and more specifically to detecting network traffic sources that intentionally or unintentionally transmit packets of non-audio data marked as audio data.
2. Introduction
In packet networks, packets can be marked for processing. Such markings can identify a packet as an audio packet, video packet, or data packet. Typically network infrastructure grants an audio packet the highest priority, followed by video packets and then data packets. A problem arises in which network devices either intentionally miss-mark non-audio packets as audio packets for higher priority or network devices are mistakenly plugged in to the wrong part of the network which causes non-audio packets to be marked as audio packets. These incorrect markings lead to such miss-marked traffic receiving more preferential treatment than is justified. These are two examples of sources of “rogue traffic”, i.e. network packets of one type that are marked as another type. In either case, sources of rogue traffic use bandwidth of which the system is unaware. The system continues to allocate or allow bandwidth within a committed data rate (CDR) or queue to be used even though it is already used by rogue traffic. Thus, packets are dropped even when the network devices think sufficient bandwidth is available in a particular CDR or queue.